The Effectiveness of Guilt and Shame Appeals on Health Communications: The Moderating Role of Self-construal and Personal Cultural Orientation

Abstract

This study examines the moderating effects of self-construal and personal cultural orientation on the relationships between guilt and shame appeals and health message compliance. Binge drinking is chosen as the health issue for this study and a between-subjects experiment (n = 301) was conducted to test the model. The study makes several contributions to the literature of communications using guilt and shame appeals by exploring conditions under which such appeals are more effective. The main effect of self-construal on guilt/shame arousals was found, but no interactive effect with referencing or sources of evaluation. The effect of personal cultural orientation, which has been under-researched in the guilt and shame emotions, on message compliance supported an interactive effect with emotion type. Novelly, the methodological value of this research is in the study of response/emotional arousal from the stimulus, not the stimulus/appeal itself.

The conflicting effects of self-construal on impulsive buying tendency toward unhealthy food: the moderating role of future time perspective

“…This study confirmed that self-construal (Hashimoto & Yamagishi, 2016;Nguyen et al, 2021), future time perspectives (Antunez et al, 2022;Gidlöf et al, 2021;Nystrand et al, 2021;Tortora & Ares, 2018), and the interaction between those constructs can contribute to an extended understanding of impulse buying tendencies for unhealthy food from social and temporal dilemmas perspective in a bicultural self-construal Asian country, Vietnam. It highlights the conflicting effects of independent versus interdependent self-construal on impulsive buying tendency (Kacen & Lee, 2002;Mai et al, 2003;Zhang & Shrum, 2009) toward unhealthy food while showing that future time perspectives can modify the such impacts Furthermore, the current study also provides the support of the second-order construct of self-construal (Gudykunst & Lee, 2003;Hardin et al, 2004).…”

“…Thus, this study explores the conflicting effects of independent and interdependent selfconstrual on impulsive buying tendency towards unhealthy food. Since self-construal is culturally and individually imposed (Cross et al, 2011), this study will provide new insights into individual differences in the phenomenon of impulsive buying tendency, particularly in an Asian culture (Lam, 2006;Mai et al, 2003;Nguyen et al, 2021).…”

Guilt Induced Message Elaboration and Effect on Attitude towards Value Adoption: An ANCOVA Approach

“…AG was found to be in high in cases where individuals felt an unwanted future occurrence rather than in retrospection of a past event that has already happened (Block, 2005;Kayal et al, 2018;Pounders et al, 2018). Through an exploration of recent studies, it can be asserted that in social context, existential guilt can be more effective in evoking moral responsibility through the aroused sense of empathy (Nguyen et al, 2020;Stuhler, 2018). However, in context of environmental and pro-social behavior, which involves a certain amount of threat inducement to allow realization of catastrophic effects in future anticipatory guilt will be a more suitable appeal to be utilized in communication parlance (Mukherjee & Chandra, 2021;Wang & Basso, 2019;Wen & Qi, 2020).…”

The Effectiveness of Robot-Enacted Messages to Reduce the Consumption of High-Sugar Energy Drinks

“…The underlying objective of the message is to communicate the health-related attributes of the products. Advertisers use message credibility, inferences of manipulative intent, attitude and purchase intention and changes in brand selection to evaluate the effectiveness of the message appeals [74,75]. These key variables provide advertisers to compare the effectiveness between different message executions.…”